


Actually Perfectly Fine

by telm_393



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Anxiety, Exhaustion, Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Overwork, Sickfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-25
Updated: 2013-08-25
Packaged: 2017-12-24 13:42:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/940653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/telm_393/pseuds/telm_393
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hermann is a very difficult patient.</p><p>The Kaidanovskys are surprisingly okay with that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Actually Perfectly Fine

**Author's Note:**

> This is a fill for a prompt on the Pacific Rim kink meme that kind of...grew. Here's the prompt: http://pacificrimkink.livejournal.com/1613.html?thread=2766413#t2766413.
> 
> AHHH I ALMOST FORGOT. I'm also filling in the square for "unexpected friendship" on my trope_bingo with this fic. :)

“Dude, you don’t look so good,” Newton said earlier today, and now Hermann wishes he hadn’t simply scoffed at his lab partner’s concern (though Hermann hates to admit that's what it was).

Because the truth is, he doesn’t feel so good either. He’s been awake for at least three days straight and before that had slept very little, and he is at a truly alarming stage of exhaustion.

Newton, who has also been awake for quite some time, went to sleep at least an hour ago, telling Hermann to “get some fucking rest, geez”, but Hermann had let himself become distracted by the numbers on his chalkboard before realizing they were swimming in a way that was making him quite honestly feel a bit nauseous.

That was when he decided to head back to his quarters.

However, he hadn’t taken into account that he had neglected his physical therapy for the past several days, since the last Kaiju attack had happened just four days ago and he had first been preparing for its landfall and had then been in LOCCENT while Cherno Alpha tore the latest Kaiju apart. Then he had found himself too tightly wound to even think of sleeping, and had instead worked on a report for Marshall Pentecost that had fallen to the wayside.

This means that now his leg is throbbing so painfully and allowing him to put such little weight on it that he is quite honestly concerned that he will not be able to make it to his quarters, and he has to consider the genuine possibility that he won’t be able to get around easily tomorrow, what with the rushing around he’s been doing.

It’s terribly irritating.

And to make it all worse, to make it all so frustrating that, mixed with pain and exhaustion, Hermann is embarrassingly close to tears, he has no idea where his room is.

He only arrived at the Vladivostok Shatterdome a month ago, and he has spent very little time in his quarters, and he has also always had a very embarrassing, unfortunate lack of a sense of direction.

Now, the Shatterdome seems to be stretching out at all sides, with several hallways that could very well be the one that will lead Hermann to his room and save him from this damned maze.

Unfortunately, they could all very well not be.

Hermann briefly considers throwing the kind of tantrum he did when he was a child and got overwhelmed, which often consisted of him sitting down, covering his ears, and _screaming_ , but then he reminds himself that he is thirty-one goddamn years old.

He decides to move down one of the closest hallways, trying to ignore the way that his hands are shaking (he wishes it were the cold, it’s not) and his eyes are blurring and the way the cold of the Shatterdome has seeped into his muscles and bones, making his already uncomfortably painful leg throb in dull agony.

He recites Pi to himself instead, moving forward aimlessly and occasionally having to steady himself, because he’s almost certain that if he ended up on the floor he would not be able to get back up without assistance and he is not going to be humiliated that way.

That’s when Hermann runs into a wall and comes very close to falling down.

Except the wall reaches out and steadies him, with surprisingly gentle hands. For a wall.

Unsurprisingly, the person with his hands currently steadying Hermann is not, in fact, a wall. He does seem to be the male Kaidanovsky, who is far taller than any human being has any right to be, and who is looking down at Hermann with some concern.

“Dr. Gottlieb?” the man asks.

Hermann blinks up at him, part of him instinctively wishing to run away because this is a _very_ large man and he is a _Jaeger pilot_ and sometimes people like him don’t take very kindly to people like Hermann. Existing.

Also he’s being touched.

He doesn’t like that.

But most of him is perfectly aware of his current actual physical inability to run away, not just because the hands holding him up are also holding him in place, and also his current inability to do anything at all except wish for sleep. He’s so exhausted, and shivering, and his face feels suspiciously sweaty, and the world is spinning in a really very confusing manner.

And now the only thing keeping him upright is a human mountain who probably has much better things to do and will leave Hermann in a moment. Hermann cannot blame him. This is all very awkward.

“Where are you going?” the man asks carefully. He has a very deep voice.

“I—” Hermann says, fully intending to answer the question before realizing that he has no idea. He tries to answer anyway. “I am going to my quarters.”

“Where is that?”

Hermann is quite honestly very worried right now, to the point where his breath is coming a bit faster than it should be, and if he has a panic attack now he really will pass out. He’s been having very regular panic attacks since arriving at Vladivostok. Nobody ever said Hermann takes well to change.

Hermann tries to say something vague and self-assured like, _Oh, it’s around, I’ll find it soon enough,_ but instead finds himself gasping for breath when he opens his mouth and can do nothing but uselessly shake his head.

And then his leg gives out on him completely, screaming at him over the abuse it’s been suffering lately, and he finds himself scrabbling for purchase against Kaidanovsky’s jacket.

And then the ground is not under his feet at all, and it takes his sluggish and anxious mind a while to process what’s happening.

Is…he being carried? Like a _child_?

Well, that's just not on, he will not stand for this, but he honestly can’t get out words, so instead he tries to make himself as small as possible and tries to stop shivering so violently, leaning against Aleksis Kaidanovsky’s large chest and copying its rise and fall with his own.

Then he finds himself in a room, being deposited gently onto a bed. He hisses in pain as he tries to get himself into a comfortable position, but instead finds himself on his side, putting all of his weight onto his better side, letting out pained, shuddering breaths.

He can hear two people conversing in Russian, and he has enough Russian that usually he would be able to make out what the two are saying, but his head has started pounding and he is _this close_ to weeping, so he falls asleep instead.

Hermann finds himself waking up shivering and confused and still aching all over, his leg having gone stiff and numb with pain, and he feels like he’s somewhere in between freezing and burning, and he wants to vomit but he swallows the need down. There’s nothing to regurgitate anyway. Hermann is fairly sure that the last thing he ate was half of a sandwich Newton shoved into his hands, and that was at least seventeen hours ago.

He’s confused as to where exactly he is until he remembers, with something like a groan, that yesterday he made an absolute fool of himself in front of a Jaeger pilot, and he is most certainly not feeling well enough to get out of bed this very second, but he will try his absolute best because one thing Hermann Gottlieb will never, ever be is a burden.

He sits up, trying to keep his arms from shivering violently, and at some point in time somebody took off his shoes and they’re next to the cot, and the idea of having to put them back on seems like a monumental task, considering how difficult it is to just bend the knee of his bad leg.

Hermann still swings his legs over the edge of the cot, pulling on his thigh to get his bad leg to move, damn it all, and finds that the parka Newton gave him because “it’s cold in Russia and I am one hundred thousand percent sure the coat that you have is going to fall apart any time now” is halfway across the room.

Hermann doesn’t let that daunt him. He swallows bile, takes a deep breath, and tries very hard not to fall asleep again, because he’s still tired, it’s just his disturbed dreams that don’t allow him to get any rest. His cane is within reaching distance, and he grabs it, positioning it on the floor so that he can use it for leverage when he stands up, which generally works—in fact, Hermann can usually get up without much leverage at all—but not on bad days.

This is, evidently, a bad day, the kind of day during which he grabs onto the closest person who will not make a snide comment about it to stand up—Newton, usually, sometimes Mako or Stacker depending on who’s closest—and when he tries to do it by himself, getting off of the bed slowly, he simply finds himself falling on the ground in an ungainly heap, just as the door opens.

He looks up, eyes wide, at Lt.’s Sasha and Aleksis Kaidanovsky, who are thankfully not looking at him with pity or disgust, but do seem rather puzzled and largely unimpressed by what he can now admit was little more than an escape attempt to save everyone embarrassment. Of course, he only added to it.

Aleksis walks over and helps Hermann back up to the cot. It seems that the room has two beds, one of which is larger than the other and where Hermann assumes the Kaidanovskys must sleep, though rather uncomfortably considering their size compared to the size of the bed. Hermann doesn’t ask.

He doesn’t say anything.

“For Heaven’s sake,” Sasha says, “Lie down. You look as though you have had no rest in days.”

This is patently untrue. Hermann just slept for—he checks the clock—ten whole hours.

Hermann blinks blearily, and Sasha looks at him oddly before walking over and putting her _hand_ on his _face._

She pulls away quickly, thankfully, though she is frowning.

“You are hot,” she says severely.

Hermann cannot have a fever, no matter what his body says, so he shakes his head. “That’s not possible.”

Sasha raises an eyebrow. “That is very possible. In fact, it seems to be the case.”

Hermann shakes his head again, which is a mistake, because the room immediately starts spinning and his headache comes back.

“Here,” Aleksis says, handing Sasha a thermometer.

No.

Hermann hates thermometers.

“Open,” Sasha says.

Hermann will not be babied like this, and he stays with his mouth stubbornly closed.

“This or doctor, your choice,” Sasha says.

Hermann hates doctors more than he hates thermometers, and the words make him grudgingly open his mouth and have the wretched horribly textured thing stuck under his tongue, which just makes him feel more nauseous.

After what seems like a very long time, Sasha retrieves the thermometer and looks at it, frown becoming even deeper. “Fever of 102.”

For a moment Hermann wants to say, “That’s impossible, I would be dead,” before realizing the thermometer must be in Fahrenheit, which is more than a little embarrassing. Maybe his mind is not quite as sharp as it ought to be.

But he honestly can’t see any reason why he should have any kind of sickness, he’s really fine, which he communicates to the Kaidanovskys, who simply raise their eyebrows at him in disturbing tandem.

“You have been working too hard,” Aleksis says solemnly, and Sasha nods in agreement.

Hermann scowls, trying not to fall over. “How would you know?”

“It seems rather clear. Have you been eating?”

“I most certainly have,” Hermann says, lying through his teeth, of course.

There they go, raising their eyebrows incredulously again.

“I’ll bring some soup,” Aleksis says to Sasha in Russian. “You stay with him.”

Hermann does not appreciate the implication that he needs to be stayed with. 102 is a very manageable temperature. He could probably go to work right now.

“I don’t like soup,” Hermann mutters mutinously. Sasha looks slightly amused.

The truth is that Hermann doesn’t even know why he said that.

He does like soup. Well. Depending on the kind of soup, he supposes, but he does not dislike soup in general enough to to make such a blanket statement.

“Lie down, doctor,” Sasha says.

Hermann will do nothing of the sort.

He is old enough to make his own decisions in regards to whether he will lie down or not, and he has chosen not to, and he will stick to that choice because he is not sick enough to be whiling the day away like this, even though he would like to sleep, and to tell the truth he’s probably not expected to come into work today. But he should go to work. There are Kaijus to fight, though not for another four months. But he still has things to do.

He is very, very tired. Far more tired than he should be after ten hours of sleep. He generally only gets about five on a good night.

His sleep has always been restless.

Hermann crosses his arms across his stomach protectively and stares at the floor, resolutely deciding to look anywhere but Sasha.

He wishes she would just help him to the lab if at all necessary and be on her way. However, if he went to the lab in this state, Newton would most likely bother him until Hermann went back to his quarters, wherever they are, to rest anyway.

After a few torturous moments of silence, Aleksis gets back from the mess hall, a large bowl of soup that Hermann _will not be eating_ cradled in his huge hands.

Sasha has apparently been arranging the pillows on the cot to be able to allow him to both lie back and sit up while Hermann was sulking—that is, seething with righteous outrage, and Hermann finally gives up on being allowed—and yet again, he is _not a child_ —out of this damn room and carefully lies back among a truly surprising amount of pillows.

A pillow is set in his lap, along with the soup, and Hermann sees that it is chicken noodle. He resents that.

Hermann pokes at a noodle in the bowl with the spoon. He’s gotten past the stage of hunger where he wants food and has reached the stage where there’s an acidic ache in his belly and the idea of ingesting anything at all makes him feel nauseous.

He peeks over the bowl to look at what Sasha and Aleksis are doing. Aleksis appears to be reading, and Sasha is doing something or other on an old computer.

Hermann briefly considers making a break for it before realizing what a truly ridiculous idea that is. Besides, he hates to say it, but there’s almost something comforting about this atmosphere. It’s probably just that Sasha and Aleksis are large and well-built and have fought Kaijus for years, but Hermann feels the safest he has since arriving at Vladivostok.

But he still doesn’t want to eat.

He continues to poke at the food and swish the broth around and occasionally scoops up a mouthful of soup before changing his mind and pouring it back into the bowl.

“Doctor?” Aleksis asks with some concern. “Are you going to have food?”

Aleksis asked a question, so Hermann feels he is perfectly justified in his response. “No.”

Aleksis now looks exceedingly unimpressed, as does Sasha, who has looked up from her computer.

“You gave him a choice,” Sasha says in Russian. “That’s always a mistake.”

Hermann scoffs. “That’s entirely unfair.”

Sasha levels a look at him that’s actually vaguely intimidating. “You need to eat. Soup is good for you. Eat the soup.”

Hermann is not going to eat the soup.

“Eat," Aleksis says imperiously.

Hermann changes his mind then, which is his choice, naturally, and he reluctantly brings the spoon to his lips and at the very least drinks the warm broth, only not grumbling under his breath because it’s difficult to do that and eat at the same time.

It takes him a very long time to finish eating the soup—he’s always eaten like this, slowly, carefully, eating one food first and then another, if there’s more than one on his plate—and he ends up leaving about half of the vegetables and noodles and chicken because they've mingled too much to be edible.

And in his defense, it was a very large bowl.

He moves the remaining contents of the soup around, still unable to find anything that isn't too mixed up to be eaten properly—and he doesn’t care if the Kaidonovskys don’t like it, if they try to make him eat something like carrots and chicken that have been mashed together he _will_ scream—and he puts the bowl to the side.

Sasha takes it away, raising a damned eyebrow at the leftover food, but Hermann scowls at her and she seems…well, she seems vaguely amused, but she doesn’t mention it.

Hermann lies back, wincing because his leg continues to throb. His hands are shaking too hard to massage any kind of pain out of his wayward limb, and he’s quite honestly still exhausted, which is very frustrating, and he wants to _vomit,_ and he is sweating, and his head hurts, and his stomach hurts, and everything hurts, and he thinks he might actually be sick, which is extremely frustrating, because he is _not the kind of person who gets sick_.

Except he recalls being a very sickly child, and the way his mother would cry when she thought he couldn’t hear her, and the way his father would stroke his hair and hum old songs. Those were the only times Hermann wasn’t afraid of the man.

And his sister and brothers would look at him as though he was not fit to play with, too worried about his spraining an ankle or breaking a bone or somehow sprouting a fever from too much exercise, so he would sit in his room and lift toy airplanes in front of him and imagine flying.

But by now, even after the injury that left his leg as it is today, he doesn’t fall ill nearly as often as he did when he was young, and when he does he just works through it. He hasn’t been sick like this in a long time, he thinks.

Hermann feels weak and he _hates it,_ because he is not weak and he will not stand for allowing this to continue, and he tries to get up to inform the other occupants of the room that he has decided to pull himself together and not be ill anymore and thanks for their help but he really didn’t need it, but he can barely lift himself up. He’s so _exhausted_ , and the feeling of trying to get upright makes a wave of nausea run through him.

He feels utterly useless and he hates it, and he’s lying on his better side, his less painful side, by now, and it’s unfortunately facing the Kaidonovskys, who are looking at him curiously every once in a while, seeming concerned, even though he’s _fine_ , really, he’s only a little perturbed at the moment but he’ll get over it.

He puts an arm over his eyes and tries his best to bury his face in some pillow, because he’s started to cry and he has no idea why, this is why he loathes being sick, it’s always made him act ridiculous.

Hermann has perfected the art of crying, even sobbing, very quietly over the years, so he thinks the Kaidonovskys won’t notice.

He is wrong, which he doesn't appreciate.

“What is the matter?” Aleksis asks, and Hermann would answer correctly—“nothing”—but he’s too busy with this irksome crying business.

Hermann feels a huge but strangely comforting hand on his shoulder and upper back, and isn’t sure whether he wants to lean into or away from the touch. He’s not very tactile, he’s never been, and the hand on his body feels somewhat...uncomfortable to him, so he ends up cringing away. The hand moves to his hair, smoothing it back from his forehead and running fingers through it, and Hermann likes that better.

It almost makes him feel better, too, like the Kaidonovskys aren’t just doing this for him because they’re the hero type, like he’s not a burden even when he tries not to be.

Hermann’s headache begins to abate, and his breathing begins to even out, and his tears finally stop, as he just concentrates on the soothing feeling of Aleksis’s touch.

“Everybody needs to be taken care of every once in a while, Doctor,” Sasha says from wherever she is, very matter of factly, like she’s saying something obvious. “It is nothing to be ashamed off.”

Hermann scoffs a bit because that’s not even a little bit true, though it is nice.

“Sleep,” Aleksis says. “We will be here when you wake up.”

Hermann doesn’t know why that’s comforting in the least, but it is.

And it’s true.


End file.
